Actress Odessa A'zion has pulled out of A24's latest film, Deep Cuts, after online backlash over her casting. The movie is an adaptation of author Holly Brickley's novel, set in the early 2000s, which explores a romantic relationship between college friends Percy and Joe. Fans of the novel were unhappy Marty Supreme star A'zion was due to play supporting character Zoe Gutierrez, described in the book as having Mexican and Jewish heritage. The 25-year-old actress announced she'd pulled out of the production, admitting she had not read the novel and saying she should have paid more attention to Zoe's background before signing up. A'Zion, whose mother is Jewish, was criticised for taking on the role, with users online arguing the part should have gone to a Latin American actress.

The creation of high-quality multimodal datasets remains fundamental for advancing role-playing capabilities in large language models (LLMs). While existing works predominantly focus on text-based persona simulation, Audio Role-Playing (ARP) presents unique challenges due to the need for synchronized alignment of semantic content and vocal characteristics. To address this gap, we propose AudioRole, a meticulously curated dataset from 13 TV series spanning 1K+ hours with 1M+ character-grounded dialogues, providing synchronized audio-text pairs annotated with speaker identities and contextual metadata. In addition, to demonstrate the effectiveness of the dataset, we introduced ARP-Eval, a dual-aspect evaluation framework that assesses both response quality and role fidelity. Empirical validation showing GLM-4-Voice trained on AudioRole (which we called ARP-Model) achieve an average Acoustic Personalization score of 0.31, significantly outperforming the original GLM-4-voice and the more powerful model MiniCPM-O-2.6, which specifically supports role-playing in one-shot scenarios. The ARP-Model also achieves a Content Personalization score of 0.36, surpassing the untrained original model by about 38% and maintaining the same level as MiniCPM-O-2.6. AudioRole features dialogues from over 115 main characters, 6 trained ARP-Models that role-play different characters, and evaluation protocols. Together, they provide an essential resource for advancing audio-grounded role-playing research.

Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo sounds off on Rosie The Pivoter ODonnell for her latest criticism of the Trump administration and the NEA teacher of the years admission that the job is deeply political. President Donald Trump has escalated his long-running feud with Rosie O'Donnell. On Saturday, Trump, 79, floated the idea of revoking the 63-year-old comedian and actress's U.S. citizenship following her move to Ireland earlier this year. "Because of the fact that Rosie O'Donnell is not in the best interests of our Great Country, I am giving serious consideration to taking away her Citizenship," Trump wrote in a post to his social media platform Truth Social. "She is a Threat to Humanity, and should remain in the wonderful Country of Ireland, if they want her. GOD BLESS AMERICA!" he added.

The TV show of the gaming hit The Last of Us has proved to be a streaming blockbuster for HBO, pulling in 7.5 million viewers for its fourth episode after four straight weeks of gains. But video game adaptations don't always work well - even when they're backed by the most extravagant budgets, hottest stars and based on the biggest hits from the gaming world. Paramount's Halo and Netflix's Resident Evil were canceled after just one season, while the 2005 film Doom received a 5.2 out of 10 on IMDB. The failures come down to creators using a different structure in their storytelling than what gamers love in the games, along with the lack of puzzle solving that players appreciate while in the virtual worlds. The Last of Us has become a mega-hit for maker HBO and has overcome the odds of failing video game adaptations.

The Last of Us came out in 2013 on the PlayStation 3 and is considered one of the best video games ever made. I know this because the week it came out I drew the curtains on the front room of my shared house, forbade all of my housemates from entering the zone unless they were going to watch in reverent silence, and completed it. In the game you play Joel – finally, some Joel representation! Every human you encounter is trying to stab you or scavenge bullets off you or recruit you to one side of a conflict between the citizen army and the underground uprising. Every monster you meet is infected with a brain fungus that makes them blind, bulbous and very bitey. But what made the game stand out was the story: Joel is escorting Ellie, a fungus-proof teenage girl and humanity's last hope, across a long trail that will take them both to safety.

The past few years have proven that human intelligence has failed us fucking big time. It's an insult to the term intelligence to even call it intelligence. Does that sentence make any sense? I don't know--I'm becoming increasingly dumber just being around y'all. Maybe artificial intelligence is the answer, even though movies from Blade Runner to The Matrix to Ex Machina have served up mixed outcomes for humanity.

The classic 2013 horror game The Last of Us is being remade for PlayStation 5 and PC, developer Naughty Dog has announced. Retitled The Last of Us: Part I, the new version will be released on 9 September on PS5 and later on PC. The Last of Us follows widower Joel and teenager Ellie across a ravaged US in the wake of a pandemic that has turned most of its population into zombies, and won acclaim for its unflinching devotion to storytelling as well as the performances of its cast. It was a landmark game of the PlayStation 3 generation, and was remastered for PlayStation 4 in 2014. Announcing the remake on a Summer Games Fest livestream, director Neil Druckmann explained that the character models and animation have been redone to bring them closer to the real-life performances of the game's stars, Troy Baker (Joel) and Ashley Johnson (Ellie).

Seasons in live service games typically lasts for a handful of months. The first season of "Halo Infinite," however, will have lasted six months by May 3, an unusual amount of time in the marketplace. "Halo Infinite" launched with the promise of speeding up seasonal updates, and Staten said work on the third season is also underway.

Quite how Halo hasn't made it to the screen, small or big, before this is an enigma almost as nebulous as the long-running first person shooter video game's crowded mythos. Luminaries such as Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson and District 9's Neill Blomkamp have all been involved in trying to get a film based on the explosive exploits of Masterchief across the line for the best part of two decades, yet to no avail. Even this big-budget – it reputedly cost more than $200m and looks like gold – TV series starring Pablo Schreiber as the genetically engineered soldier-hero of the United Nations Space Command (UNSC) has been held up for two years by Covid. Never mind, it's here now, and fans of the games who just want to see their nightly battles with giant space monsters played out on the TV screen will no doubt be more than content with Kyle Killen and Steven Kane's adventurous if somewhat insipid reimagining. Unfortunately, those of us who don't recognise every re-enacted power-up bleep and helmet-cam vision of destruction will probably find ourselves wondering, much of the time, quite what is going on.

Rotten Tomatoes recently shared a list of DC Extended Universe (DCEU) movies to explain the timeline. However, they mistakenly featured the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movie, "Guardians of the Galaxy" title in that list. This mistake has not gone down well with director James Gunn, who was quick to take a dig at the list. Gunn reposted Rotten Tomatoes's tweet on Wednesday, and wrote, "I'm surprised Guardians is after Birds of Prey in the DCEU timeline." The comment came after the DCEU timeline featured a poster of Gunn's recently released TV series, "Peacemaker," but the title was written "Guardians of the Galaxy."